The Rise of Arabic on the Web [Infographic]

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It took 30 years for 2 billion people to come online,
but 1 billion more will come online in the next 4 years, according
to Smartling's
overview of the multilingual web. The Arab World will be at the
forefront of that expansion, if Arabic content on the web continues
to grow at its current rate.

The Middle East accounts for 3.3% of the web's users,
and 3% of language use online- not a large percentage. But use of
Arabic on the web has increased 2500% since 2000. The Arabic
content gap is a thing of the past; while gaps in relevant,
localized content remain, Arabic use on the web is proportional to
the population, and on the rise.

Twitter is a particularly fast-growing domain. As The
Next Web reported, Arabic use on Twitter
grew at a rate of 2147% between October 2010 and 2011,
galvanized by the uprisings and revolutions in the region,
according to a
study by Semiocast. While Arabic still only accounts for 1% of
total tweets, it's in the top ten languages used on
Twitter.

The numbers will continue to multiply now that
Twitter has released
new right-to-left language capability this March (previously
available on Twitter clients), thanks to 13,000 volunteers,
including a Saudi blogger, Egyptian college students, a journalist
at the BBC, the co-founders of the grassroots #LetsTweetInArabic
campaign, academics specializing in linguistics, and teenagers in
Lebanon.

The amount of relevant Arabic content on the web will
also get a boost this year from Wikipedia's new reach into the
region, in partnership with Cairo University, in which students
will begin translating and creating original Arabic online
encyclopedia pages (More on this soon from our interview at Arabnet
with Barry Newstead, Chief Global Development Officer at the
Wikimedia Foundation).

As the sheer amount of Arabic content increases,
online and mobile advertisers- especially in Arabic- will have more
space to sell to. 90% of polled users in Saudi Arabia prefer Arabic
ads on their smartphones, according to a study by Plus7 that
MediaME and The Next Web recently reported on. With around
one-third of e-commerce customers in the UAE, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar
and Saudi Arabia are comfortable with mobile purchasing,
opportunities in the mobile ad space (or Arabic mobile e-commerce
space) in the region are hardly tapped out.

Browse Smartling's infographic below (click for the
large version) for a glimpse of how Arabic stacks up on the global
web, and head to their website for the full,
interactive HTML 5 version.

Nina is director of Launchpad UAE, a platform that fosters the development and execution of social impact enterprises and corporate social responsibility initiatives, for sustainable environmental, economic and human capital development. Previously she was editor-in-chief at Wamda and more recently managing director of Flat6Labs Abu Dhabi.